Out of the mouths of babes

Remember school around the corner? It used to be on a Sunday evening before Heartbeat, which incidentally was the programme that signified a bath was imminent and would be swiftly followed by a bout of Monday-itis.

Well, school around the corner involved everybody’s friend Frank ‘the weatherman’ Mitchell having a chat to school children about this and that, while squirming parents held their breath in the audience praying that their precious cherub would not tell the nation the family secrets.

I have several schoolteacher friends and they have at times found themselves in the Frank Mitchell role when a pupil provides too much information. But the funniest has to be some of the answers they and other teachers have come across in exams.

History first and did you know ‘in war time, children in big cities had to be evaporated’ that ‘ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies who all wrote in hydraulics and crossed the Sarah dessert and that poor Jesus died on Christmas day?

Science now and according to one student H20 is hot water and C02 is cold water, while a magnet is something you find crawling over something that is dead. Apparently before giving a blood transfusion you must check to see if the blood is affirmative or negative.

Did you know that seizure is a roman emperor and a centimetre is an animal with a hundred legs? Terminal illness is when you are sick at the airport and giraffes need long necks because their heads are so far away from their bodies. An adaptation is when you go to live with another family and symmetry is a place where dead people live.

The funny thing about children’s exams answers is that you can see their reason and can trace how their minds have travelled to just short of the correct answer.

What is also funny is spotting plagiarism, where for the most part a story barely makes any sense and then suddenly slap bang in the middle you’ll find the most exquisite prose ‘John wonted to go play sum footbal perchance it happened to be Spring’.

Equally a child can describe something with such aplomb that you would struggle to put it better your self ‘the ballerina lifted her long slender leg, like a dog at a lamp post’.

 And its not just at school that children are free with their information, like the now (in) famous scenario which occurred in my friends house. Every night just as they were about to sit down to dinner the nosey neighbour called round. On one occasion so fed up was he of the nightly intrusion the father of the house exclaimed ‘see if that is that bloody woman again!’ the child answered the door and came back into the kitchen followed by the neighbour and shouted ‘aye you’re right daddy it is that bloody woman!!